"Only dull people are brilliant at breakfast"
-Oscar Wilde		 Brilliant at Breakfast title banner "The liberal soul shall be made fat, and he that watereth, shall be watered also himself."
-- Proverbs 11:25
"...you have a choice: be a fighting liberal or sit quietly. I know what I am, what are you?" -- Steve Gilliard, 1964 - 2007

"For straight up monster-stomping goodness, nothing makes smoke shoot out my ears like Brilliant@Breakfast" -- Tata

"...the best bleacher bum since Pete Axthelm" -- Randy K.

"I came here to chew bubblegum and kick ass. And I'm all out of bubblegum." -- "Rowdy" Roddy Piper (1954-2015), They Live
Monday, November 14, 2011

That sound you hear is John Derbyshire screaming
Posted by Jill | 5:28 AM
Remember John Derbyshire? He's the National Review columnist who in 2001 called for the murder of Chelsea Clinton. Well, this news is going to make him (and quite probably Limbaugh, whose ravings I can hear in my head already) go completely off his nut (NYT link):
NBC is to announce on Monday morning that it has hired Chelsea Clinton to become a full-time special correspondent for NBC News.

The appointment is immediate. Ms. Clinton will show up at the news division offices on Monday morning, said Steve Capus, president of NBC News, and will begin work on stories that NBC expects to use as part of its “Making a Difference” series, which runs on “NBC Nightly News.”

Now, I'm not in favor of presidential daughters being able to waltz right into an on-air gig on a nationally-televised program without having to go through the local news gauntlet of covering hit-and-runs and standing outside in blizzards telling people what they already know, any more than I'm in favor of smug little pricks being able to waltz into Washington correspondent/analyst gigs just because their father was Tim Russert. But the unfortunate reality is that in today's world of news-o-tainment, celebrity trumps journalism most times, leaving me to wonder if NBC's hiring of Actual Journalist™ Alex Wagner for a noon show on MSNBC was designed to offset this obvious nepotism hire.

It isn't as if the hiring of high-profile political daughters in anything new, and the reality of Jenna Bush already being a correspondent for Today and Meghan McCain being a contributor to MSNBC's lineup SHOULD silence the critics (not that it will). Still, it's difficult enough these days to convince anyone to go into mainstream journalism, given the Coffee Gofer and Local News path that is the traditional path into the national news scene. And with the many thousands of people toiling out there as bloggers, I'm not sure that the elevation of Chris Hayes and Alex Wagner is sufficient to justify this unfortunate trend in celebrity newsbotting.

But if it makes John Derbyshire's head explode with rage, maybe it does.

Labels: ,

2 comments
Bookmark and Share
Friday, July 29, 2011

Is MSNBC deliberately trying to taint its own brand?
Posted by Jill | 6:39 AM
Pundits whose brains are incapable of holding two thoughts at the same time think that MSNBC is "the left's Fox News". But while most (not all) of MSNBC's news/commentary shows lean to the left of what passes for the center these days (which really resembles 1964 Goldwater conservatism more than anything else), there is one characteristic of MSNBC's hosts that does not apply to Fox: With the exception of Joe Scarborough, who's still living in a delusional Republicanland where idiotic mouth-frothing teabagger lunatics don't control his party, MSNBC hosts don't just pull lies out of their asses and pass them off as demonstrable fact. And especially now that they've unwisely jettisoned the oh-too-confrontational Cenk Uygur, MSNBC represents the genteel left. Like it or not, you're never going to see Lawrence O'Donnell (who admirably fought bravely on as Joey the Scar tried to filibuster him yesterday morning) call Rep. Peter King an asshole on the air. And even Rachel Maddow, who is now completely free to do pretty much whatever she wants, as MSNBC's reigning star, tends to wield tiny poison darts at those she demolishes rather than of carrying a big stick -- and doing it all with a smile. It's a successful formula that has managed to survive, and even thrive, in the post-Olbermann era, even as people like me have returned to the Olbermann fold, preferring to watch "The Last Word" as time permits the next day.

But aside from the factual differences between MSNBC's coverage of current events and that of Fox, MSNBC's point of pride is hat it hasn't acted as the propaganda arm of a political party the way Fox News does. O'Donnell is a bit too much of an Obama cheerleader for my taste; obviously still subscribing to the 11-dimensional chess theory of Obama rather than what increasingly looks like the reality -- that at best Obama is twisting himself into pretzels to appeal to and appease the right because of his unique childhood baggage, while at worst he really IS a moderate-right conservative. At least O'Donnell has arrived at his views through a coherent thought proess and is prepared to argue his points rather than just spouting talking points. But as we found out with the jettisoning of Cenk Uygur, MSNBC is first and foremost about access, and when opinion interferes with that access, Phil Griffin steps in.

The best spin on the decision to replace Uygur with Al Sharpton, despite strong ratings, is to add more diversity to MSNBC's all-white lineup (though it seems to me that with Muslims and gays being the hated minorities of choice on the right these days, a lineup that has an out lesbian in Rachel Maddow as its public face, the British-of-Pakistani-origins Martin Bashir on in the afternoon and Uygur, who was born in Turkey to Sunni Muslim parents, is more diverse than ANY on other news channel). So when MSNBC decided to replace Cenk Uygur with Al Sharpton at 6 PM, I had to scratch my head. Sharpton? Yes, Sharpton can be incisive and even funny when talking off-the-cuff, and he stole the show at the 2004 presidential debates, but even cable news is not journalism school. And for a sizable portion of the population, the name "Al Sharpton" is still far too closely associated with the image of Tawana Brawley insisting that "No one manipsnates (sic) me or my family."

Sharpton is a bright guy and has been a media star, or at the very least a media figure, for a long time; and even Rachel Maddow had that deer-in-the-headlights look for a few weeks in the beginning as she became more comfortable with a teleprompter. I'm sure that once he's more comfortable, we'll see the witty side of Sharpton come out, but demeanor isn't Sharpton's only problem. As Glenn Greenwald notes, Sharpton really IS the left's equivalent of a Fox News host -- to the detriment of the MSNBC brand:
On Sunday, Cenk Uygur was interviewed by CNN's Howard Kurtz about Uygur's departure from MSNBC, and Ugyur claimed that Al Sharpton -- widely reported to be his replacement -- vowed in a 60 Minutes interview never to criticize President Obama under any circumstances.  When I first heard Ugyur make this claim, I assumed it was hyperbole -- until I watched the video and read the transcript of the Sharpton interview.  The 60 Minutes segment was aired on May 19, 2011, and chronicles what it calls Sharpton's "metamorphosis: today he's down right tame. So much so, that he has made his way into the establishment."  It includes this:

Sharpton told us that having a black president is a challenge: if he finds fault with Mr. Obama, he'd be aiding those who want to destroy him. So he has decided not to criticize the president about anything -- even about black unemployment, which is twice the national rate.

The segment also described Sharpton as "now a trusted White House adviser" and recounts that "given his loyalty and his change from confrontational to accommodating, the administration is rewarding him with access and assignments."

How can a media outlet such as MSNBC that purports to be presenting political journalism possibly employ someone as a journalist -- even an opinion journalist -- who publicly and categorically pledges never to criticize the President of the United States under any circumstances?  That would be like hiring a physician who vows never to treat any diseases, or employing an auto mechanic who pledges never to fix any cars, or retaining a pollster who swears never to make any findings about public opinion.  Holding people in political power accountable is the prime function -- the defining feature -- of a journalist, including a pundit; if you expressly and publicly vow never to do that, how can you possibly be credibly presented as being one?  And how can the political analysis of someone who takes this pledge possibly be trusted as sincerely held, let alone accurate?  Note that this vow was not from three years ago; it was from two months ago.


There's an ongoing battle going on over at the Great Orange Satan about how much to criticize Barack Obama. And even here, I see comments every now and then telling me to STFU about Obama, that to criticize Obama is to want Mitt Romney to be president (speaking of not being able to hold two thoughts in one's head at the same time). But when we are seeing play out before our very eyes what happens when people put rigid ideology (and in the case of criticism of Obama, keeping one's mouth shut isn't even about ideology) or party loyalty ahead of the national good, it's difficult to justify keeping silent while President Obama time after time proceeds to blow whatever chance he had at being the transformational leader he could have been. It does the nation no favors, and in Al Sharpton's case, it taints whatever journalistic cred he's trying to build.

So here is MSNBC, a network that's established a niche, that can even point to the high morning ratings of Joe Scarborough as showing diverse points of view and Andrea Mitchell and Chris Matthews as the faces of "traditional journalism", that genuinely CAN be described as "fair and balanced" for the most part, getting rid of some of its most formidable talent for speaking too much to power and replacing one of them with a guy who has steamer trunks of credibility-tainting baggage.

It makes me wonder if Sharpton was hired specifically so that if he doesn't get Cenk's ratings, it will be deemed an excuse to abandon its even vaguely left-of-lunatic-right leanings and again try the "Let's Be Like Fox" tactic.

Labels: , , ,

10 comments
Bookmark and Share
Saturday, November 06, 2010

Stickiness, or how Rachel tries to sort it all out
Posted by Jill | 9:32 AM
We'll see if the fine line Rachel is trying to walk here is enough to save her. If not, I can't wait to see Phil Griffin get his ass kicked when the Fox News audience he covets so much refuses to leave its chosen church.



Say what you will about Fox News, but what it has is something marketers always covet: stickiness. Sticky content is a concept normally used in the context of web site traffic, but it applies to television, or consumer products, or anything. It's a kind of loyalty that transcends simple endorsement of a product, becoming almost a kind of cult.

Apple is the perfect example of this kind of marketing cult. Sure, Apple makes great products with cool designs, but when you have people camping out at night like people used to do for Grateful Dead concerts to be among the first to get an iPhone, you're talking about more than just cool products. I've just encountered iPads on two separate trips to visit family and both times have found myself drooling, "WANT. SRSLY. NOW."

Dish Network is another one. The Brilliant household has been a Dish customer for over a decade. Recently, following a basement remodel and the purchase of another flat-screen TV, we had a choice to make: Do we stay with Dish Network and get another connection and receiver for the basement, or do we succumb to the Evil Empire over at Verizon, where we could get TV, FiOS internet, AND phone -- for about half (well, for two years anyway) of what we pay now? We stuck with our current cobbled-together setup of Dish, a good old fashioned land line phone, and our Verizon DSL. Why? Mostly because we just like Dish Network as a company. Recently, Cablevision, the company which has a monopoly in my town and in the general area, was unable to broadcast any Fox channels due to a rates dispute with News Corp. This blacked out a good chunk of the World Series, Giants football, and the popular Glee. News Corp. wanted to extort DOUBLE the fees out of Cablevision. The problem is that Cablevision is so loathed by even its own customers that it was able to garner no sympathy from its customers, and ended up capitulating to News Corp.'s demands. And now Cablevision customers face yet another rate increase. It's interesting to note that while Cablevision was busy losing its battle with Rupert Murdoch, Charlie Ergen, the almost cult-worshipped CEO at Dish, was quietly negotiating a far better deal with Fox.

Fox News is also an entity that boasts this kind of devotion. CNN has completely destroyed its credibility in recent years by trying to be more Fox-like, and instead of pulling away viewers from Fox, it's simply ruined its own unique journalistic brand. Fox viewers are not going to leave Fox. It's their club, their cult, their religion, and they're not going to leave it just because Phil Griffin puts some wingnut in Keith Olbermann's chair and cries out, "Look! Shiny!"

In 2003, MSNBC yanked Phil Donahue off the air, even though he had the highest-rated show on the network. No, he didn't get the ratings Fox had, but it was MSNBC's highest rated show. An insider report revealed the network's view that Donahue presented a "difficult public face for NBC in a time of war." Donahue was replaced by the very same man whose fingerprints were all over the Olbermann suspension yesterday -- Joe Scarborough, and the network hired right-wing hatemonger Michael Savage for a Saturday program.

It wasn't until MSNBC recognized that Keith Olbermann's audience is "sticky" that the brass there decided to take the chance on left-leaning political talk in primetime. And it's worked for them; perhaps not as much as Fox, but certainly better than any of the Alan Keyes/Michael Savage/outer wingnuttia experiments they did in trying to strip off Fox News viewers.

Even Olbermann's biggest fans acknowledge that he's often bombastic and self-important. Only rarely, as with his on-air eulogy for his mother (for which he won the 2010 Edward R. Murrow award) and his sharing of his late father's journey through the health care system to which people with money have access in the context of health care reform, does he come across as someone you might conceivably want to, well, have a beer with. His Special Comments, while passionate and often on-the-money, are so easily turned into parody that it's difficult to watch them now without thinking of the Ben Affleck parody. But anyone who thinks that Olbermann is simply a knee-jerk cheerleader for Democrats is delusional. If he has not been as tough on the Obama Administration as he was on the Bush Administration, it's because despite the former's appalling embrace of some of the worst national faux-security excesses of the Bush Administration, the Obama Administration isn't as relentlessly destructive of American values. Obama has taken more crap from Olbermann than ANY officeholding Republican has EVER taken from Fox News.

Rachel has it right here. Keith Olbermann's personal political leanings are no secret to anyone. No one watches Olbermann to get passionless, so-called "objective news." And Keith Olbermann never claims to be "Fair and Balanced" -- as if saying so makes it so. What both Olbermann and Maddow do not do, however, is just pull stuff out of their asses (like claiming that President Obama's upcoming trip to India is going to cost $200 million a day) and push it out over the airwaves so that it can become the proverbial lie told often enough that it becomes truth. Both shows are COMMENTARY -- and are presented as such.

Yesterday on the Today show, Meredith Viera looked as if she was going to have hot girl-on-girl action with Christine O'Donnell any minute, so fawning was she over the loser of the Delaware Senate race. Funny how she didn't have Sharron Angle on. The whole thing smacked of an interview for a job on MSNBC -- perhaps in Keith Olbermann's spot. I can almost hear the MSNBC front office suits talking about having two people named O'Donnell on at night would be a sure winner.

Labels: , , ,

1 comments
Bookmark and Share
Monday, November 16, 2009

In other news, the sun will rise in about an hour
Posted by Jill | 5:21 AM
Maybe it's all those job cuts at the New York Times. But tucked away below the fold today is a rather peculiar article expressing wonder that MSNBC, which despite three hours of the Idiocy of Joe Scarborough (or if you prefer, Joe Scarborough's Presidential Exploratory Committee's Fifteen Free TV Hours Every Week), and Chris Matthews' Excoriation of Bad Girls Who Get Themselves Pregnant (sic), is regarded as "the liberal network" actually criticizes the Obama Administration -- from the left:

While much attention has been paid to the feud between the Fox News Channel and the White House, the Obama administration is now facing criticism of a different sort from Ms. Maddow, Keith Olbermann and other progressive hosts on MSNBC, who are using their nightly news-and-views-casts to measure what she calls “the distance between Obama’s rhetoric and his actions.”

While they may agree with much of what Mr. Obama says, they have pressed him to keep his campaign promises about health care, civil liberties and other issues.

“I don’t think our audience is looking for unequivocal ‘rah-rah,’ ” said Ms. Maddow, who calls herself a liberal but not a Democrat.

The spectacle of Democrats sniping at one another is not new, but having a TV home for it is. MSNBC — sometimes critically called the “home team” for supporters of Mr. Obama — has even hit upon the theme with a promotional tagline, “pushing back on the president,” in commercials for “Hardball,” Chris Matthews’s political hour.

“Our job is not to echo the president’s talking points,” said Phil Griffin, the president of MSNBC. “Our job is to hold whoever’s in power’s feet to the fire.”


I suppose that when you're in a profession which has decided that "some say..." is an authoritative source, and that known lies have to be given the exact same weight as the truth simply because some lunatic in Pocatello said it at a teabag rally (or Fox News said it at any time of the day or night), the idea that it is possible to knock your own teem must seem rather alien. Or perhaps it's just that "journalists" like Brian Stelter, who write this piece, are no longer capable of stringing two thoughts together. But the fact that it is news that the most liberal of MSNBC's hosts are ctiticizing Barack Obama ought to underscore just HOW much Fox News is nothing but a water-carrier for the GOP.

For all that lazy so-called journalists elsewhere insist on the meme that MSNBC and Fox News are exactly the same, the Liberal Trinity of MSNBC in the personae of Rachel Maddow, Keith Olbermann and the I Still Don't Trust Him Ed Schultz, are quite open about the fact that their shows are offering analysis of news through the perspective of their shows' hosts, rather than God's Own Truth As Reported By Sean Hannity and Glenn Beck. Fox News will trot out Greta Van Susteren, who I guess constitute "balance" simply because she's not totally off her rocker, or the pathetic Alan Colmes or the embarrassing Juan Williams, as evidence that they're "balanced." But that's sort of like saying that a school's pupils embraces diversity because the school's star linebacker beats up the kid with cerebral palsy every day. Every day at MSNBC, after I Got My Job Because My Dad Is a Raconteur Willie Geist fills up a half-hour of airtime, you get three hours of Joe Scarborough clutching his pearls about Barack Obama bowing to the much-shorter Japanese Prime Minister or whatever offends him that day.

The day that Fox News replaces its Three Morning Idiots with Break Room Live with Maron & Seder, then we can talk.

Labels: , ,

1 comments
Bookmark and Share